u/Signal_Brain_933

UPDATE: HUGE THANK YOU TO EVERYBODY! The Food Storage calculator has undergone a MAJOR revamp thanks to your feedback. Here's a rundown of what the latest version (now live) offers:

• I reframed the tool from a simple calorie calculator into an Emergency Food Storage Planner.
• I added body-size adjustment for adults, seniors, pregnant, and breastfeeding household members.
• Manual calorie overrides:
  • per-person known daily need
  • whole-household known daily target
• Added a household buffer option: 0%, +10%, +15%, +20%, or +30% for waste, stress eating, picky eaters, teens (yup, these variables were much needed!), cold, hard work days, etc.
• Added planning modes:
  • deep pantry / normal meals
  • mostly ready-to-eat
  • limited cooking
  • cook-from-scratch staples
  • no power
• New: pantry style presets for starter shopping guidance:
  • budget canned food
  • bulk staples
  • no-cook
  • high-protein
  • kid-friendly
  • gluten-free
• Diet and household flags for things like gluten-free/celiac, diabetes/blood sugar concerns, low sodium, allergies, vegetarian/vegan, infant/formula needs, and elderly/medical needs.
• I added a lightweight current pantry snapshot so users can flag what they already have: canned meals, dry staples, protein foods, fats/oils, comfort foods, and special-diet foods.
• Brand new result sections for:
  • practical pantry examples
  • ready-to-eat vs cook-required split
  • cooking/fuel/water reality checks
  • nutrition gaps
  • shopping-list starter
  • known limitations
• I de-emphasized “rice equivalent” as the answer and added more normal grocery examples: canned meals, staples, proteins, fats, snacks, comfort foods, etc.
• Added better no-power guidance and cross-links to the matching water calculator.
• I also updated the PDF/print summary to include the new assumptions.

Hope this tool is helpful to some of you. Thanks again so much for all the feedback, it's so much better because of your contributions!

https://omniprepper.com/free-calorie-calc/

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Hey everyone! A couple of weeks ago I shared my free water storage calculator here and got some really helpful responses. The feedback from this community helped shape the newer version, especially around pets, livestock, longer planning windows, and more realistic household water use. So first off, thank you for that!

I’m working through the same process now with a free emergency food storage calculator and would really appreciate another round of practical feedback.

I built this one to estimate how many calories your household would need for short or extended emergencies. It factors in:

- Household members by age band
- Adult sex
-Pregnancy and breastfeeding
-Activity level, from sheltering in place to active evacuation or cold weather
- Extra medical or special caloric needs
- Planning windows from 72 hours up to 2 years
-Estimated dry food weight, storage volume, and rice equivalent
- What you already have stored, so it gives a gap number instead of only a total target
- I also added a short methodology section because I know food planning gets messy fast. It’s not trying to be a clinical nutrition calculator; instead it uses broad emergency planning estimates, not exact height, weight, BMI, or medical diet needs. The latest update also split kids into narrower age bands instead of one giant “child” category, which was a fair criticism I got from early feedback.

Totally free, works offline once loaded, saves to PDF, and no account or signup needed:

https://omniprepper.com/free-calorie-calc/

And since so many people of you tested the water calculator last time, it’s still available online free also:

https://omniprepper.com/free-water-calc/

I’d love feedback on anything that feels iffy or plain wrong: assumptions, age/activity bands, long-duration planning, storage estimates, confusing wording, missing household situations, or anything that would make it more useful in real life.

Thanks again everybody, this community has been so receptive and awesome!

EDIT: V2 is live, and folds in the awesome suggestions I received in this thread. Thanks so much to everybody who tried it out, and especially to anybody who gave me feedback! Calorie Calculator is much better because of your help!
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Hey guys, a couple of weeks ago in here I shared a free water calculator and got phenomenal feedback from so many people in this community. Thank you again! Because of all the feedback, the water calc is now on its fourth version to factor in all the suggestions you all gave me, and that was pretty darn motivating so I figured I'd come back for round 2 with my second free prep tool.

This new one calculates how many calories your household needs to store for an emergency, based on who's actually in your family/household.

What Calorie Calc (V1) does:

• Individual member profiles (adults, teens, children, seniors, each with their own age group, sex, and activity level)
• Four activity levels from resting/sheltering to heavy labour or cold weather conditions, because what you need to survive a week at home is pretty different from what you need during an evacuation
• Separate options for pregnant (early vs. late trimester) and breastfeeding (not lumped into one bucket)
• Special needs / medical field for household members with elevated caloric requirements
• Outputs: total kcal needed, estimated dry goods weight and volume, rice equivalent, and a gap calculation showing exactly what you still need to acquire
• Works offline, no account, prints/saves to PDF
• Bilingual (English and French)
• Free (always!)

Try it out: https://omniprepper.com/free-calorie-calc/

Oh and also, if you missed my water calculator post from a couple weeks ago, that tool is still up and now on V4 thanks to all the comments I got from people in this awesome community: https://omniprepper.com/free-water-calc/

I'd REALLY appreciate your feedback on this new calorie tool, especially anyone who’s ever actually lived off stored food for an extended time period, or if you have household members with specific needs (pregnant, elderly, high-activity, etc…). The numbers I'm using here are based on DRI/WHO guidelines but I know real experience can often tell a totally different story.

Methodology is at the bottom of the page if you feel like poking holes in it (that's encouraged, it’s what helped make the water calculator so good!).

A few things I'm specifically curious about:

• Do the activity level multipliers feel right to you?
• If you have experience feeding a household through an actual emergency, do the totals feel realistic?
• Anything obviously missing that you'd want to see?

Thanks again folks, this community made the water calculator way better and I'm hoping the same magic happens here!

UPDATE: See V3 details at bottom!

Hey all! A week and a half ago I shared a home-made readiness-focused water calculator in another preparedness subreddit and got WAY more feedback than I'd expected. Lots of people tried out V1 and pointed out gaps (mostly around animals, existing water sources and homesteads) so I went back to the drawing board and rebuilt a big chunk of it. V2 is what came out of that, so I figured now that it was more polished, I could share it further!

It helps you figure out how much water your household actually needs for a short or extended emergencies, factoring in things like:

• Everyone in the house, including infants, elderly, and medical needs
• Pets and livestock individually (cats, dogs, chickens, goats, horses, pigs, rabbits, sheep)
• Your climate and activity level
• Cooking, sanitation and hygiene
• Garden and irrigation (optional, if that's part of your resilience plan)
• What you already have stored, your water heater reserve, and what your well, rainwater collection, or stream can realistically contribute so that you get a real gap number, not just a raw requirement

Three planning modes: survival minimum, functional household, and comfort maintained. The calculator runs in your browser, works offline once loaded, saves to PDF, no account or signup needed. And completely free.

https://omniprepper.com/free-water-calc/

Hope this can be useful to some of you! Happy to answer questions or take more feedback, the calculator's already been shaped by one huge round of community input so I'm super open to another!
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QUICK UPDATE: V3 is live ahead of schedule! I wanted to come back and say thank you to everybody in here again because this latest update was almost entirely built from the awesome suggestions in this thread.

What's new in this version:

• Light/dark mode toggle: Top right of the page, defaults to your system preference. Somebody mentioned the white-on-dark was hard to read, especially on mobile. Fixed!
• Shower, laundry, and dishwashing fields (now under a collapsible "Hygiene details" section.) Shower frequency and type (bucket bath, low-flow or standard), laundry method and loads per week, dishwashing method. These feed directly into the daily total and the gap calculation.
• 6-month and 12-month planning windows (which totally makes sense for pandemic and long-duration scenarios)
• Safety buffer option : this new feature adds 10%, 15%, or 20% on top of your calculated total to account for spillage and inefficiency. A few people pointed out the numbers felt a little tight in real use... well, here's the fix!
• Better defaults! The tool now loads with 2 adults, functional household mode, and a 2-week window so you get a useful result immediately without having to configure everything from scratch (easier for first-time users)
• Minimum 3 day stored water warning: if your stored supply or sources fall below 3 days even with reliable access, the tool now flags it. Sources can fail, right?
• Better results breakdown: members and animals now show descriptive labels instead of "Person 1 / Person 2"
• Long-duration note: at 6 and 12 months, the tool now reminds you that federal emergency guidelines are designed for short-term events and long-term planning involves logistics and consideration beyond a minimum number.

Still free, still offline, still saves to PDF, still no account needed. Enjoy, and thanks again for the feedback!

Hey everybody, on Sunday I shared a free emergency water calculator here and the response from this community totally blew me away. I wasn't expecting so much engagement tbh, and I read every single comment. Thank you SO MUCH to everybody who chimed in!

One piece of feedback kept coming up: animals. Several of you pointed out (very correctly) that the original tool handled pets in a pretty clumsy way and didn’t accurately factor in livestock or multiple pets of different species. If you're running a homestead with goats, chickens, horses, or a mixed barn, the old version was mostly useless for your situation, so I went back and rebuilt a big chunk of it.

What's new in my V2 version of the water calculator:

• Multi-animal roster: instead of vague pet buckets, you can now add animals one by one (cat, small/medium/large dog, chicken, rabbit, goat, sheep, pig, horse, and unspecified by size) with quantity and species-specific water rates based on veterinary and agricultural guidelines
• Extra livestock care water: this is a separate field for enclosure cleaning, wound care, birthing, feed washing, all the stuff that isn't drinking water but still needs to come from somewhere
• Planning modes: this was a big takeaway from all the comments. Survival minimum (hydration only, close to the FEMA floor), Functional household (the original behaviour), and Comfort maintained (adds volume for bucket showers and basic hygiene)
• Continental climate option (for those of us with hot summers and cold winters (yes, Canada))
• Normal food prep: a middle option for people who just cook normally and don't want to pick between freeze-dried and dry goods if and when the grid goes down. Lucky ducks.
• Water supply balance: the results section now shows a proper balance sheet: what you need, what you already have stored, your water heater as a reserve, and what/how your daily sources (well, rainwater, stream) actually contribute over your planning window, so the gap number finally means something
• Water source logic: You can now mark sources as potable as-is (for example if you have a clean well) or needs treatment, and pick your treatment method (boiling, gravity filter, UV, etc.). I’ve left untreated water as still counting toward animal and garden use even if it doesn't count for drinking
• Garden and irrigation: I added a field for this since a lot of homesteaders and gardeners asked
• 2 month and 3 month planning durations
• FEMA comparison line: to show how your target compares to the federal minimum so you can calibrate as per your priorities
• Copy results to clipboard: just a bonus plain text summary you can paste anywhere

Still completely free. No account. No signup. Works offline once loaded. Saves to PDF from the browser print dialog. Both English and French available.

https://omniprepper.com/free-water-calc/

Still a work in progress and I'm still listening, so if something doesn't make sense or your situation isn't covered, let me know below. I’m alone at home testing this, so if there’s a glitch I haven’t noticed, please tell me!

Hey all; flight attendant, dad, long-term casual prepper here. Wanted to talk shop about emergency water storage.

So I’m always seeing the preparedness tip “1 gallon per day per person” everywhere; it’s pretty much on every ‘standard’ emergency checklist, most YouTube prep videos bring it up (except for those made by people who actually bother to think through complex readiness situations), not to mention every FEMA handout. But it just didn’t sit right with me, like it seemed that this advice was mostly designed as the bare minimum for an average, minimally active adult in temperate conditions. 1 gallon per day per person doesn’t factor in cooking, pets, and no real sanitation needs beyond drinking. That’s not practical reality for most emergencies (short or long term scenarios), and I feel like the generic advice might be doing a disservice to people who want to be prepared for a variety of scenarios.

A family dealing with hot summers and cold winters with kids and a dog (my exact family situation) is in a completely non-generic situation. Example: in winter our bodies need more water than you think just to stay warm and hydrated indoors. And in the summer the “needs gap” gets even wider. The 1g/day rule wasn't “technically” wrong when it was first written by some bureaucrat somewhere (it’s an easy figure to remember for everyday families who don’t want to think too hard about this), but I don’t think it actually works very well for most of us.

For my own household (two adults, two kids (11 and 15), one large dog, cold winters and hot summers), the real number (based on my own calculations) came out to 20.4 liters / 5.4 gallons per day. For a 2-week supply that's 285 liters / 75.4 gallons total. 

I got my numbers by building an HTML calculator that works through a person or family’s actual situation. You put in your household size and ages, climate, pets, activity level, and whether you'd be cooking with dry goods in an emergency situation. It breaks down exactly where your water goes; drinking, sanitation, cooking, pets - so you can see what's influencing your results instead of just a final total. It also tells you what that amount of water looks like in real containers (jerry cans, jugs) so you can actually go buy the right sized containers (or swimming pool, if that’s how you’re playing it).

Free, works offline (so long as you’ve pre-loaded the page in into your browser first), you can print your results, no account needed: https://omniprepper.com/free-water-calc/

Curious what numbers everybody else gets, especially anyone in more extreme climates or with larger families, or livestock, etc. If the methodology looks off anywhere, or if other variables should be included, please say so, I’m happy to keep improving this tool. And if my methodology is off anywhere, please let me know. I’d rather fix it than defend it.

Not a gear question. Just one skill, for this summer.

Much as I wish I lived like the family in that old Swiss Family Robinson movie (probably my favorite childhood movie), I'm really the only outdoorsy one in my household. I backpack, hunt (not much, but enough to know what I'm doing), fish, know emergency first aid, martial arts ,archery, horseback riding, wilderness survival... and I care a lot about preparedness. I had a blast teaching my oldest how to build a primitive debris shelter in the forest last summer which was genuinely one of the better weekends we had together. But on the whole, my family (especially my wife) isn't really wired that way. Bugs = bad. No toilets = bad. Couches and iPads = good. Prepardness is... meh. And that gap between my family and I has been bugging me.

This all made me think less about what skills are most "tactically useful" and more about what's actually transferable to someone who doesn't want to live in the woods. First aid keeps coming back as my answer (my youngest just started babysitting classes, so there's some basic First Aid there). First Aid crosses over into everyday life, it's not threatening or weird to learn, and it could matter on a Tuesday afternoon just as much as a grid-down scenario.

But I'm curious what other people with families like mine (families who aren't already "prepper commited" or outdoorsy by default) have done. What's the one skill you actually got them to learn and stick with? What made it land?

*** PS: Even better if it's a fun, not overly-intimidating skill we can adopt and practice together while travelling - we're all going to South-East Asia for a family vacation this summer. Thanks in advance!

The people I work with probably think I'm just really into cooking because of how often I bring up what's in my pantry. My neighbors probably think I'm really into gardening (even though I mostly suck at it) although they already think I'm eccentric because I go rucking in the neighborhood 3-4 times a week. My extended family knows I'm into post-apoc fiction, wilderness survival, and that i "like to be organized." But aside from a few very close friends (and my immediate family), nobody really knows that I'm into prepping.

There's something a little exhausting about that. Is it weird that I'm occasionally self-conscious about this, almost like it's a really fringe hobby? I've put real time, money, and thought into building resilience for my household, and it's not something I can just casually bring up without watching someone's face do that thing where they're trying to figure out if you're a conspiracy nutcase.

The doomsday prepper stereotype is so sticky. The second you say the word most people picture bunkers and tinfoil and someone counting bullets in a basement. It doesn't matter that what you're actually doing is storing food, learning skills, and thinking pragmatically about very possible risks, scenarios that aren't even that unlikely these days.

I've gotten better at speaking in translation, or "dumbing down" my process for casual conversation. Instead of "I'm freshening up my bug out bag," it's "I like being ready for power outages." Instead of "I'm working on comms redundancy," it's: "I bought a weather radio on a Prime Day Deal." It kindof works, but it also means I'm never really having the actual conversation.

Have any of you actually managed to talk openly about your own preparedness pursuits with people outside the prepping community? Did it go well or did you immediately regret it? Curious whether anyone has found a way to normalize this topic without it becoming a whole thing that defines who you are for the rest of your life.

Anyone else here have a job that makes family prepping majorly complicated?

I'm a flight attendant for an international airline, so yeah. My work (which I love) creates a problem I don't see discussed much in preparedness groups: I'm not always home.

Sometimes I'm in Tokyo, Sao Paolo, or New Delhi when my family is back home asleep. If something big ever happened, I could be stuck on another continent with no realistic path back and limited communication options. My wife and kids are great, but they aren’t particularly preparedness-minded individuals.

I've slowly been building up our home supplies and trying to have casual conversations about what they'd do in different scenarios, but I know that if I were 8,000 miles away and SHTF happens, they'd be largely on their own and figuring it out in real time.

It's a different kind of anxiety than the standard “how do I prep for X” calculus. It's not just "do I have enough food and water”, or “how do we bug out”, it’s more like "would my family know what to do without me, and what would I even do stranded in a foreign city with just my rollie bag and a hotel room."

I keep some local currency, a lifestraw, a packable backpack, some basic travel sized first aid supplies when I'm abroad. I know where embassies are, and leave a simple one-page emergency plan on my fridge my family can follow. But honestly I feel like I'm guessing.

Does anyone else here have work situations that create this kind of split-location problem? Truckers, military families, travel nurses, offshore workers, performers, etc? If so, how do you actually plan around it?

Hey all... Amateur homesteader/preparedness-minded Dad here. Lately I've been thinking a lot about gut health as a prep that almost nobody talks about. We spend a ton of energy on calories, water filtration, shelf-stable carbs, gardening, etc... but in a supply-chain disruption or prolonged emergency your immune system and digestion are going to be under major stress. Fermented foods feel like one of the most overlooked answers to that.

I started making sauerkraut last fall (mostly out of curiosity). Cabbage, salt, a half-dozen mason jars, two weeks of waiting. That's pretty much all it took. And now I have something that lasts months in my cold room. It costs almost nothing, and actively supports gut health in a way that no re-hydrated meal ever will.

My mom joined the party and made me a large batch of kimchi, and also gave me a sourdough starter I've managed to keep alive through sheer stubbornness. But I feel like I'm just scratching the surface.

For those of you who have built fermentation into your regular pantry routine: is this a conscious "just in case" resilience decision for you, or did it start as just a food hobby? Do you think about it differently now?
And for anyone who's been doing this for a long time: what are your absolute staple recipes? What's the most beginner-friendly ferment that delivers real results (yes, I know alcoholic beverages delivers "real results", but I'm mostly looking into food options here :))? Any mistakes you wish you'd avoided, or hacks to pass along to a newbie?

Asking because I want to get more intentional about this, and I'd rather learn from people who've actually been doing it for a long time. Thanks in advance!

I really got into ultralight backpacking a few years ago (thanks to r/ultralight). Trimming my base weight forced me to think completely differently about “survival math”. Every gram/ounce has to justify its existence, and luxury items are constantly reevaluated. You start semi-obsessively asking questions like: what does this item or piece of gear actually do for me, and what's the lightest way I could accomplish the same thing? That line of thinking bled directly into how I think about bug-out bags, redundancy, comfort vs practicality, and more. And the “fun suffering” of walking long distances in nature, sleeping outdoors in a variety of conditions, dealing with hunger, water purification, critters, boredom, physical strain… I imagine this would help my mindset in a real emergency.

The other one might sound ridiculous, but I read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction. Good authors put their characters under believable pressure and stress and the decisions they make often leave me wondering how I’d react in that situation, fictional or not. And there’s often some valuable practical info and prep wisdom buried in those stories. And mentally, it helps me foresee how communities could fracture, or how quickly norms might collapse. What people actually barter for versus what they think they'll barter for. You get a kind of low-stakes mental simulation of scenarios that can’t really be reproduced outside of fiction. “The Road”, “Station Eleven” (awesome Canadian novel), “Lucifer's Hammer” (my favorite), “Bird Box”, “The Passage” (trilogy), and so many more. I probably pulled more mindset insight from those than from half the forums I hang out at.

So what's your prep-adjacent hobby? What do you do that isn't officially prepping but is actually making you more prepared or resilient?